The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul. When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion’s chemical surrogates-alcohol and “goof pills” in the modern West, alcohol and opium in the East, hashish in the Mohammedan world, alcohol and marijuana in Central America, alcohol and coca in the Andes, alcohol and the barbiturates in the more up-to-date regions of South America. […] The employment for religious purposes of toxic substances is “extraordinarily widespread…. The practices studied in this volume can be observed in every region of the earth, among primitives no less than among those who have reached a high pitch of civilization. We are therefore dealing not with exceptional facts, which might justifiably be overlooked, but with a general and, in the widest sense of the word, a human phenomenon, the kind of phenomenon which cannot be disregarded by anyone who is trying to discover what religion is, and what are the deep needs which it must satisfy.

Ideally, everyone should be able to find self-transcendence in some form of pure or applied religion. In practice it seems very unlikely that this hoped for consummation will ever be realized. There are, and doubtless there always will be, good churchmen and good churchwomen for whom, unfortunately, piety is not enough. […]

They take part in rites, they listen to sermons, they repeat prayers; but their thirst remains unassuaged. Disappointed, they turn to the bottle. For a time at least and in a kind of way, it works. […] The effective object of worship is the bottle and the sole religious experience is that state of uninhibited and belligerent euphoria which follows the ingestion of the third cocktail. […]

All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call “a gratuitous grace,” not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions.

~ Doors of Perception

It’s supposed to be a horror movie, though at least the first hour was boring; nothing happened. I do like that it’s not an American slop film, and things did pick up later. But yeah, I didn’t like this movie. 5/10.

“This is how one ought to see,” I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers, or glanced at the jeweled books in the shelves […]. “This is how one ought to see, how things really are.” And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.

Just looking, just being the divine Not-self of flower, of book, of chair, of flannel. That would be enough. But in that case what about other people? What about human relations?

One ought to be able," I said, “to see these trousers as infinitely important and human beings as still more infinitely important.” One ought-but in practice it seemed to be impossible. his participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the necessary concerns of human existence. […]

How was this cleansed perception to be reconciled with a proper concern with human relations, with the necessary chores and duties, to say nothing of charity and practical compassion?

Mescalin can never solve that problem; it can only pose it, apocalyptically, for those to whom it had never before presented itself. The full and final solution can be found only by those who are prepared to implement the right kind of Weltanschauung by means of the right kind of behavior and the right kind of constant and unstrained alertness

Over against the quietist stands the active- contemplative, the saint, the man who, in Eckhart’s phrase, is ready to come down from the seventh heaven in order to bring a cup of water to his sick brother. […]

The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms. The contemplative whose perception has been cleansed does not have to stay in his room. He can go about his business, so completely satisfied to see and be a part of the divine Order of Things that he will never even be tempted to indulge in what Traherne called “the dirty Devices of the world.” When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when “the sea flows in our veins… and the stars are our jewels,” when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure? Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor

~ Door of Perception

This is the connection between mysticism and ethics I was looking for: the recognition of the subject–object divide, and then the melting of the two, resulting in an outlook that, when kept in mind at all times, makes negative virtue impossible. For how can you sin when you know that you would be transgressing against the holy that you have experienced yourself?

Metadata

• Date: 10.10.2025
• Dosage: 75ug
• Duration:
  • Intake: 15:00
  • Peak: 17:30
  • Offset: 20:00
• Special
  • Masturbation before intake extends duration of post-orgasm and euphoria.
  • Couldn’t sleep until 04:00, recommend intake in the morning.
  • Not much visual effect, but very vivid imagination.

I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. […] This was the world—a poor thing but my own—which I expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself.

The change which actually took place in that world was in no sense revolutionary. […] But at no time were there faces or forms of men or animals. I saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces, no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings, nothing remotely like a drama or a parable.

~ Door of Perception

In other words

He too expected the “psychedelic” to be a purely visual revolution, but instead found the transformation to be primarily qualitative. It points to how the psychedelic experience isn’t reducible to sense phenomena; it’s more about the mode of disclosure, the way Being presents itself.

Report

I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

“Is it agreeable?” somebody asked. […]

“Neither agreeable nor disagreeable,” I answered. “it just is.”

Istigkeit—wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? “Is-ness.” The Being of Platonic philosophy— except that Plate seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

~ Doors of Perception